Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another episode. And if you want 2026 to be the best year of your life, I'm running a free two-day live workshop on how to build yourself into a high performer January 14th and 15th.
To learn more about it and register for free, go to 2026workshop.com. Once again, 2026workshop.com. Today, I'm going to be talking to you about how to stop your fear and your anxieties that are holding you back.
Let's talk about it. When you look at fear, when you look at anxiety, they are these sneaky little thieves that steal away so many amazing moments in your life. And what it does is they convince you the worst case scenario is most likely going to happen. If you think about it, if you've ever felt paralyzed by fear or caught in an anxiety spiral, you know exactly how powerful this can feel.
But the truth is, fear and anxiety only has the power that we give it. And so if you have a lot of fear, that's holding you back, you're giving it the power. If you have a lot of anxiety that's holding you back, you're the one that's giving it all of its power. And so today I'm gonna talk about how to take your power back and how to reframe your mind to be something better.
And so I want to give you a story from my life because one of the things that's funny is people ask me questions like, well, how are you past your fears? How have you mastered yourself, your mindset? I'm like, I haven't. I still have all of the same fears. I just kind of have some tools in my tool belt to get myself out of fear or anxiety quicker than I used to. And this weekend...
was supposed to be my very first solo flight, which is basically where I drop off my flight instructor, he gets out of the plane, and I have to go fly it alone for the very first time. And so I'm seeing on the news and on YouTube and everywhere on the internet, all of these crazy plane crashes and things that have happened, these terrible stories and these sad stories that happened,
And then I'm thinking in my mind, oh my God, I've got to fly a plane for the very first time this weekend by myself, even though I'm completely ready for it. And I have way more hours than the average person that does their first solo. I found myself terrified of what could happen. And I was thinking about all of the crashes that happened. And I was thinking, oh my God, what if it happens to me?
And I started like thinking and almost accidentally visualizing tragedy happening when I go to fly the plane. And I could feel, this is the important part, I could feel inside of my body, my body was getting nervous and I was getting scared and it was trying to protect itself. And so then I realized what was going on because I'm not immune to fear.
I just noticed it and I was able to get myself out of it.
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Chapter 2: How can fear and anxiety be reframed to regain control?
So I realized that my fear wasn't coming from actual reality in my life. Now, sure, things happened in the past, but that's not actual reality of what's going to happen in the future. And my fear, my anxiety around all of it was coming from what I was focusing on. Do you get this? It wasn't in my reality of what was going to happen this weekend in the future. It was all in my head.
But it felt like it was in reality because I can look and say, well, this happened in this place and this happened in this place and this happened in this place. And I can be terrified of it and say, oh my God, well, that's reality. But it's not reality in the future because the future hasn't happened yet.
But I was projecting myself unconsciously into the future and being afraid of what could happen. And here's the important thing I really want you to understand is that both possibilities in this moment are equally as real. In this moment, I want you to understand this.
The possibility in the future of me having something go wrong while I'm flying the plane is equally as real as me taking off and having the best flight of my entire life and loving it and thinking it's amazing and being so excited and proud of myself for doing it. In this moment, both of them are equally as real. Now, do we think one of them is more real than the other one?
Yes, our brain is making up a fear and we think that that fear is real. So one version, I mess up, something goes wrong, there's a disaster. The other version, I have the time of my life, I'm soaring through the sky, I feel powerful and free. This is one of my childhood dreams. I want you to understand you did not lose your imagination in your childhood.
All too often I talk to adults and they're like, well, I'm just not as, I don't have the imagination that I used to. You know, I remember when I was a kid, I used to have such a great imagination.
And then I'm like talking to them and then they're talking about all of these fears that are holding them back and all of these unconscious visualizations that they have that are keeping them from taking action. I'm like, no, no, no. You still have that incredible imagination. It's just, you're not using it anymore. It's using you.
You're still imagining all the time, every single moment, as rich as you used to when you were a child. But most people are just imagining the worst case scenario all of the time. And it's paralyzing them and keeping them from taking the action that they need to to change their life. And so both outcomes, all outcomes exist in your mind.
And I want you to understand, if it's not about flying a plane like it was for me in this moment, that's just an example. Some of you guys want to get into a relationship. And you're thinking about all of your failed relationships and your marriage that ended in divorce and how you were cheated on and all that stuff.
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Chapter 3: What personal story illustrates the impact of fear on performance?
And now back to the show. And then I was like, you know what? This is cool, but let's make it more fun. And so I was like, I'm going to watch Top Gun 2. And I watched Top Gun 2 and I was like, this is amazing. And I started getting into like the feeling of like the pure joy of flying.
And I came across a video of the Blue Angels, which if you're not in America, you might know who the Blue Angels are. They are some of the most elite, like elite, elite, elite pilots in the world. And there's a video online of them visualizing together in a group, all of the guys around the table and speaking out loud as if they're actually in the planes.
They have their eyes closed and they're holding on to the throttle and they're holding on to the stick and the yoke. And they're calling out their turn. They're calling out, you know, going up, going down, movement, all of that. And they do an entire visualization of them flying the plane. And I was like, these are some of the most elite pilots
people at what they do in the entire world, and they're visualizing what they want to happen before they go out. How few people do that in their life, visualize exactly the way that they want something to be executed before they go out and do it. So I was like, you know what? Screw it. I'm going to do that. So I started visualizing. what it would look like to have a successful flight.
I visualized going to this airport, which is called Temple Airport, dropping off my flight instructor, going down, taxiing down, speaking on the radios, Temple Traffic, Sirius SR22T, taking off runway 16. I'm going to be staying in the pattern for touch and goes, Temple Traffic. So I'm talking to myself out loud. Then I visualize, okay, I'm going to get it to runway 16.
I'm going to hit the throttle. I'm going to hit the left rudders. I hit the throttle so that I can make sure I stay in the runway. Then as soon as we get to, okay, airspeed's alive. Okay, once we get to 77 knots, we're going to pull back and we're going to rotate and it's going to be off into the sky. And I visualized talking to myself the way it's going to go, the way it's going to be.
And you know what happened? I went from thinking about the worst that could happen, crashing the plane, what if this happens to me, to my fear shrinking, I'm watching all these people fly, my anxiety lost its grip over me, my excitement took over, And I actually got excited to go flying this weekend. So this happens to me as much as it happens to any other person.
But the secret to stopping fear is not about trying to conquer fear. It's about choosing what you give your attention to. And what you give your attention to is 100% something that you control. We can't control what's going to happen in the future. But right now in this moment, our attention and what we give our attention to is 100% in our control.
And the reason why fear feels so real is because your brain doesn't know the difference between your imagination and reality. It reacts the same to both. And I remember the first time I heard this, I was like, that sounds kind of crazy.
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Chapter 4: How does visualization help in overcoming fear?
After you challenge it, is you're gonna create the best case movie in your head. You're gonna flip the script. So instead of sitting there and worrying and thinking about the worst case scenario, you're gonna now start imagining the best case scenario. If you're gonna imagine the worst that could happen, You need to also imagine the best that could happen.
So you ask yourself, what's the most exciting thing that could happen? What's the most fun? What's the most rewarding thing that could happen? How would it feel if it went exactly the way I want it? And you close your eyes and you fully step into that version and you can see it, you can feel it, you can try to experience it as if it's actually happening right now.
So going back to the first example, if you're about to give a speech, Imagine being up there and what it feels like to be crushing it in the presentation. Imagine the audience nodding along, engaged, inspired. You standing up there and you feel confident and you feel strong and you feel in flow.
And the moment that you finish, all of the people start clapping and they appreciate everything that you said and what it feels like after you get off the stage and you just gave a great speech. And now you're shifting your focus and you change your brain's response. So instead of feeling fear, you can actually start to feel excitement.
Instead of feeling dread, you can actually feel like, oh my God, there's some possibility. We could have an amazing outcome. This could go way better than I think that it could. And you're gonna start to feel the feelings of it going way better than you were originally imagining. And then step number four is to take action anyways. Even with this shift, your fear still might linger a little bit.
It's not going to be as strong, but it might linger and that's okay. You don't have to get rid of your fears in order to take action. You can take action in spite of your fears. You can feel your fears, you can dance with them, and you can just take action with them anyways. The goal isn't to eliminate fear completely because you probably will never do that.
But the goal is to make sure it doesn't make your decisions for you. You want to be the one that's making the decisions, not your fears. Fear only controls you if you let it. So the next step is to do it anyways. It's to get in the plane and to fly. It's to step on the stage and give the best presentation that you can. It's to have the conversation that you need to have.
It's to ask that person out, to feel the fear and to do it anyways. Because once you move through it, you realize something that's really powerful. Fear is just this paper tiger. It looks scary, but it has no real teeth. And so you need to understand that if you're feeling fear, if you're feeling anxiety, it's coming from your own mind and nowhere else.
So you've got to take a step back, reframe it, and then focus on the outcome that you want versus the outcome that is the most scary to you. And if you do that, it'll make it a lot easier to work through your fears and anxieties.
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